Capital Wishlist: Karyn Pugliese wants you to read this important book

To mark the 150th birthday of Confederation, we asked local residents from a variety of backgrounds to share their wishes for the future of the capital and the country. Today: Karyn Pugliese.

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The following thoughts are my own, as an Algonquin woman, mother and journalist. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer.

Karyn Pugliese

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My vision, my hope, for the next 150 years in Canada – insofar as journalists ever express visions or suffer aspirations such as hope – is a pretty modest one.

I’d like you to read a book.

The year I was born, 1970, Olive Patricia Dickason, a 50-year-old Métis journalist, decided to pursue a degree in history.

She particularly wanted to study aboriginal history.

At first, the university told her she couldn’t. They said aboriginal history did not exist. There was no such thing.

Olive appealed to a professor who did not know much about aboriginal people, but who recognized discrimination when he saw it. He took her on.

She became the first PhD candidate in Canada to write a dissertation on aboriginal history and began teaching courses.

Her thesis was published in 1992 as Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times. It is still used as a textbook in universities today.

I grew up on my traditional land, which is today known as Ottawa; the same city where Olive was studying and inventing aboriginal history.

I really needed that book.

A Grade 6 teacher told me my people traded our land for liquor. My Grade 11 religion teacher told our whole class my people were poor, largely because we were lazy. My Grade 13 economics teacher once quipped that aboriginal people want their self-government but they weren’t about to give up their welfare cheques. She had a crooked smirk on her face as she said it.

Those things were not true.

I also recall reading a two-page Cree legend in literature class, and in Grade 8 history I learned various unnamed aboriginal people traded furs and helped explorers, who did have names: men such as Alexander Mackenzie, David Thompson and Samuel de Champlain.

That was the extent of what my peers and I were taught from K-to-13 about aboriginal people.

When people lose their history, they lose context and the ability to interpret the world around them. The little I had been taught in school didn’t make any sense with my lived experience. School made my people sound absurd. I had no words to defend myself.

I entered university the year Olive’s book was published. Her book was the reader for the optional aboriginal history class, which I had eagerly signed up for.

It took a 591-page book to begin to explain it all.

I learned the numbered treaties that were signed, although signed under duress, were pretty astute deals. They were just never honoured.

My people never signed a treaty, though; our land was just taken.

Until 1951, it was illegal to hire lawyers to pursue claims. One leader who tried was threatened with seditious libel. Even once it was technically legal, we had to wait.

Until the 1970s, First Nations communities were overseen by federal government agents. They controlled the purse strings, and frequently overruled the decisions made by elected leaders. It was never an agent’s job to build up communities, jumpstart economies, build schools or create jobs — much less file land claims.

We eventually got to court. We’re still negotiating.

Over most of Canada’s history, for 100 years, as it is finally widely known, children were also scooped out of the arms of their mothers and placed in residential schools.

There’s more. All documented and footnoted. It all connects to and explains the present.

For me, Olive’s book was worth the read. It helped me understand the conditions in the communities I’ve reported on.

I’ve been to communities where you can’t drink the water. I’ve seen communities without schools. I’ve visited homes without toilets. I’ve met families who – only now, for the first time in three generations — are raising their own children.

It’s not all bad out there, but these are some issues that linger, waiting to be dealt with.

Sometimes when our people speak, they speak with frustration. Or anger.

But those feelings aren’t directed at you.

After all, you’re just sitting at the breakfast table scanning the headlines over a morning coffee.

You didn’t cause any of these things to happen.

Aboriginal people just want Canadians to understand why things are.

And that’s important if Aboriginal Peoples and Canadians are truly serious about reconciliation and building a shared vision for the next 150 years that everyone can be excited about.

— Karyn Pugliese is a member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation, a mother and an award-winning journalist. She is also the executive director of news and current affairs at APTN.

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